


40 Years On

by titasjournal



Category: Harrison Ford - Fandom, Star Wars - All Media Types, carrie fisher - Fandom, carrison - Fandom
Genre: and cute too, angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 05:33:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10915353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/titasjournal/pseuds/titasjournal
Summary: Carrie finds an old photograph of her and Harrison, and suddenly realizes just how much she loves him.





	40 Years On

The time was nearly ten in the evening and two shaking hands clutched an old, black and white photograph. The memento captured both of them amidst white sheets, Harrison’s thrity-something body faced sideways, leaning against the headboard. A newly-crowned young adult Carrie was under his arm, his big hand sprawled on her milky skin. Her head was tilted upward, her lips slightly parted, her gaze fixated on his eyes. He was looking straight to the camera propped on some books on the bedside table. His lips were pursed. He looked impossibly relaxed, how rare for Mr. Ford.

  
She thought she had gotten rid of it.

  
In fact, in the forty years that had passed, Carrie had been almost sure any proof of their affair, apart from her journals she’d so shamelessly agreed to publish, had been destroyed. Especially their personal photographs. Evidently, this one hadn’t. And she wasn’t entirely sure if it was because she’d been writing (or rather, editing) her book a couple of hours ago, or because she’d just re-watched Casablanca, but she was suddenly missing him. And it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill missing him. No, her heart ached and the physical pain of not being with him, or not having been happy with him the way they had been in the photo ever again, was so piercing she had to sit down on her bed and take a few breaths. She dreaded these feelings, this God-awful sensation of loneliness and longing. They were rather frequent when she was single, in between relationships, all throughout her life. It was like, in some weird, twisted way, her mind and soul didn’t live inside her body, she had absolutely no control over them. Every time she found herself alone, her heart would wander around, inevitably finding its way back to memories of him. Even though she knew (she wasn’t that naïve) that their relationship, if she could even call it that, had been an excessive mesh of toxic and poisonous, she still strived to find his most loveable remembrances, the stroke of a forgotten time where he could love her and she could let him.

  
Was it possible that getting over him had been just an illusion and, if so, did she still love him?

  
A now sixty-year-old Carrie grabs her keys and drives to his house, playing the radio as loud as she could without getting a headache, so as to ignore all the feelings bubbling inside her. She feels like a teenager again, running to the boy’s house, begging him to love her. She goes over in her head what she wanted to tell him (what she’d been meaning to tell him for years) and doesn’t stop until she reaches his house. Never once did it occur to her that he might not even be home. But up his driveway she goes, stopping at the door to breathe deeply before knocking once, twice, three times.

  
Lights go on in the hallway as he opens the door: “Carrie?”

  
“Hiya hotshot,” she meant to sound carefree and just the right amount of sassy, however her nervousness shone through. “Can we talk?” it takes all of her strength not to grab his face and kiss him right there.

  
“I was eating,” he started, Carrie already making her way to the living room, brushing her shoulder to his chest in the process. “Sure, come on in.” he chuckles.

  
“Appreciate the hospitality, dear.” She looks around for a few seconds while he sits down and keeps eating his meaty dinner. She sees his wine glass and darts towards it, her being in dire need of alcohol to soothe her jitters. She takes a gulp of his glass and her lipstick leaves her lips imprinted on top of his. “I’m going to say something and I want you not to interrupt me because otherwise I’ll forget stuff and okay, you get it,” her words frantically spilling out of her mouth, his dumbfounded expression all too prominent.

  
“Sure,” he murmurs.

  
“Today I was cleaning up my room and I found this picture of us,” she fishes it out of her pocket and hands it to him, “and I had been writing that book, you know, the one I sent you the manuscript for, and I watched Casablanca and I suddenly missed you like hell and I had this thought,” she raises her eyebrows, “I thought that maybe, and quite possibly, I had been in love with you for the entirety of my royally fucked up life and, to be frank, I can’t even conceive a time when I didn’t love you, and I just thought I’d come here and, well,” she stops and fixes her eyes on his ceiling, “I don’t know what I thought, really.” She laughs softly, though tensely, his blue eyes lasering a whole in her forehead. “I’m asking you to want me again.” At those words, he gets up from his chair and turns around, facing the window to the porch. As she senses him getting edgier by the second, she tries: “I know it’s my blind optimism to blame and I’m fully aware of the fact that me loving you, even as much as I do, isn’t enough to make you love me back, but I just thought that if you felt it once,” he pivots on his feet and she takes to strides towards him. “And I know that you did,” she extends a trying hand and clutches his scalding one. “That maybe you could again.” He grabs her other hand that hid in her jeans’ pocket. “And while you’re learning how to love me again, I thought that I could love for the both of us.” She looks at him, waiting for his reaction. The room, the entire house is soundless and it feels like she has emptied out her whole body.

  
He lets go of her hands and sits down again at the table, taking a big bite of his meal, picking up the newspaper and reading the first page. She’s incredulous.

  
“You have anything to say there, Harrison?” her tone in venomous, even imperceptibly so.

  
“I’m eating, Carrie.” He simply says.

  
“You’re not serious.” She mumbles under her breath, though she couldn’t be all that surprised. She couldn’t demand anything more from him either than the silent treatment.

And, just like that, there it was. The reality check she needed to move on from him, the disappointment she was once so accustomed to. “Are you really not going to say anything?”

  
He looks up at her frame hovering over his and asks: “What do you want me to say?”

  
“Why can’t you, for once in your goddamned life, say what I need to hear?” she felt the tears looming, the frustration of being in the same position she’d been at nineteen all those years ago.

  
“I never know what you want, Carrie.” He starts, though she cuts him mid-sentence.

  
“Not this again.” Her voice trails off, her crossing her arms and adjusting her glasses.

  
“Now, you shut up.” He gets up and backing her against the wall. “You, despite acting like an open book to all, even since you were a damned kid,” he spits out the words “you’ve always kept your feelings to yourself, they were yours and no one else’s. How was I fucking supposed to know that you actually loved me? Because I reckon you never said the words out loud.” She looks at her feet, embarrassed. “You cornered me, Carrie. I told you that Ioved you, remember?” he walks closer to her and extends a hand to her. His fingers travel to her chin and he forces her head up, her eyes being pushed and falling deeper into his, drowning. “You remember what you told me, princess?” She can’t help but cry now, the memory burning her flesh. “You told me Don’t be silly, go back to your wife.”

  
She sobs on his shoulder, staining his blue shirt. He doesn’t mind it.

  
“You made me cold, dear.” His voice is sweet and mellow. “And I could never read you. I promised never to love you, it was too much to bear.” He holds her cheek in his hand. “Who am I kidding, I cared about you anyway.” He turns around and walks up the stairs to his room. After a few seconds of silence, she, confused and emotional, runs to her car right when she crosses the front door, eager to escape the pandora’s box she’d so foolishly opened.

  
“Hey, wait a minute.” He follows her to her car and takes a hold of her arm before she can get in.

  
“What? Let me go, Harrison. I’ve made a fool of myself enough for today.” He doesn’t. In fact, he ignores her utterly and strokes her silver hair.

  
“You and I,” he begins, the cool air of the midnight hours chilling her bones. “We may have the same cynical, jaded view of the world but we always went about it differently.” He kisses her knuckles and her ring sparkles in the moonlight.

  
He then hands her her manuscript, which she hadn’t realized he’d been holding. There was a post-it note on the first page written, unmistakably in his handwriting, saying Lawyer!. She snickered.

  
“Go to the next post-it.” She obeyed. He’d marked the story about their first weekend after George’s party back in 1976. He’s written in the margin I forgot about this, it was fun back then wasn't it?. She smiles down at his lovely words and finds the will to face him.

  
“I’m so in love with you, it’s actually starting to scare me.” She breathes, immediately falling into his embrace. His chest is warm and reassuring, his arms around her feel all too familiar and the longing for him subsides as soon as she closes her eyes and breathes in his musky scent. “You’re gonna say it back, mister?” she tries, sassily.

“I'm not an expressive person, dear. You're going to have to put up a lot with me, I apologize in advance.” He tightens his grip on her.

  
As she hears and actually understands his words, she excitedly questions: “I’m going to have to put up with you?”

  
“Oh, yes. Finally.” He breaks free from her embrace and looks at her. Even with only the moonlight, he can see her beauty and sugary smile, his favorite.

  
“Does this mean we get to make out now?” and he wastes absolutely no time, joining his lips to hers for the first time in what felt like forty years.

 


End file.
